Patton Oswalt on Movie Addiction, Star Wars, and the One Film He'd Watch on Loop

The actor and comic talks about how he (really, truly) lost it at the movies.

Like so many celebrities before him, Patton Oswalt has a history with addiction. But in the case of this celebrated comedian-actor-writer-producer, his dependence wasn't on any kind of substance or condition you might find Dr. Drew addressing on a VH1 reality show. No, Oswalt's habit was much more befitting of a would-be filmmaker: movies. More specifically, classic movies. And for a period of years in the mid-1990s, while he was still carving out his niche in the entertainment industry, he'd spend the bulk of his days at L.A.'s legendary New Beverly Cinema. The theater—which Quentin Tarantino purchased in 2007—served as a sort of film school for Oswalt, informing his understanding of acting, writing, comedy, and Hollywood, and ultimately leading to a book about the experience released this month, Silver Screen Fiend. We talked to Oswalt at length about his latest tome (a sort of follow-up to 2011's Zombie Spaceship Wasteland), Ingmar Bergman's funny bone, and squandering Star Wars.

ESQUIRE.COM: How did the idea for Silver Screen Fiend come about?

PATTON OSWALT: I think the idea came about after Zombie Spaceship Wasteland had come out and Scribner was asking, "Do you want to do another one? We'd love to do another book." I was going through my head to figure out if there was anything really kind of crucial and interesting to write about. I never had drug problems or anything like that, and there are all these great addiction memoirs. But then I was looking at these old calendars and schedule books and I was like, "Wow. I was just obsessed with films." It was my whole life for four years. And I was thinking, "Even though the fuel is different, can you still do an interesting obsession memoir?" So I wrote an outline and pitched it to them and they said, "Yeah, let's see." It ended up really working because it was something that did affect my life, both positively and negatively, for a long time, and I had to extract myself from a lot of that kind of magical junkie thinking that I was living under for a time.

ESQ: What was your favorite part of the moviegoing ritual?

PO: My favorite part, for the wrong reasons, was checking off the movie after I had seen it in one of my books. It was part of that superstitious list-making that you do when you are obsessed like that. But the true moments of joy were when I was watching a movie that I was initially indifferent about or didn't know anything about and ended up going, "Oh, wow. This is something amazing."

ESQ: Most of your movie-watching happened at the New Beverly. Would you just watch whatever they were playing?

PO: Yes. I also had huge blocks of emptiness of movies that I had not seen that I thought, "If I am going to be a film buff like I say and eventually a director like I think—like I'm fooling myself—then I should see these movies." So there was a lot of that. But a lot of times chasing those "well that is a classic so I should see it" movies ended up with some real surprises.

ESQ: Had you always been a big movie fan?

PO: I'd always liked movies but not on the level that I was pursuing them once I got to L.A. Then I was looking at them in the way that people like J. Hoberman or Pauline Kael and people like that would write about them. I was getting that deep.

ESQ: What's the first movie you remember seeing in the theater?

PO: Oh God... I was really young. It might have been some live-action Disney thing in the '70s. The one that made an impression was Star Wars in 1977, but I know I saw a bunch of stuff before that. Just a lot of Disney stuff like Escape to Witch Mountain,but I can't remember any of the specifics. It was more about "Oh hey, I am out here hanging out with my friends" than it was seeing the movie.

ESQ: Up until the period in the mid-1990s that you're writing about, had you had much exposure to classic films?

PO: I started watching movies in college, not deeply, but I had seen Citizen Kane and A Clockwork Orange, and Hiroshima Mon Amour and stuff like that. But the mid-1990s, that was when I really went down the rabbit hole.

ESQ: Was there one classic film that surprised you the most in terms of how much you actually enjoyed it?

PO: Yes. The Seventh Seal still baffles me. Because that is what people still hold up as shorthand for, "Oh, Jesus—an important foreign film!" Or when they show dude-bros in a beer commercial going, "But my girlfriend wants to watch some goddamn art film!" they'll show a version of that that they've mocked up. And look, a lot of those movies—Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad—those movies just, ughh! But The Seventh Seal does not belong in that company. And I am not trying to sound like I'm some elevated film snob, but it's a genuinely funny movie. It does not take itself seriously at all. It's more Woody Allen when Woody Allen was trying to be Ingmar Bergman. This was Ingmar Bergman being Woody Allen before Woody Allen existed. Because everyone in the movie is kind of sardonic. The first time Max von Sydow starts playing chess with Death he's like, "Oh my God, I'm playing chess with Death. This is amazing!" And all Death does is crack jokes at people, all he does is make fun of people. One of the guys is like, "Hey, just a little more time" and he's like "You guys always say that. Do you really think you are going to get more time from me?" You've got to watch it but it's shocking how it's really happy and beautiful. People always see the image of Death on the beach and think, "Oh God, I am not going to sit through this piece of shit!" And it's not that at all. It's really funny. It's genuinely funny.

ESQ: It's also one of those movies where the first question people ask is, "Are there subtitles?"

PO: Yes! It's like, "Oh... subtitles!" But the jokes are really funny. I was shocked. I was sitting there just grinding my molars like, "I am just going to get through this so I can say that I've seen it," but it's fucking great.

ESQ: It's definitely on that list of 10 movies that if you want to say you're a film buff, you have to see, and then pretend to like it. Even if you don't.

PO: The ones that feel like, "Okay, how much college credit do I get for watching this thing?" But it should not belong on that list. I would almost list it as a comedy because it has a very happy ending and there are jokes all along the way.

ESQ: What's the most overrated classic film?

PO: I am going to need to give this thing another run, because what I am going to say right now is going to drive a lot of your readers crazy, but it's Breathless. I have seen that thing three times now in a movie theater—I'm going to try to see it again—but goddammit. That thing just annoys the shit out of me. And I know that I'm supposed to love it and it created this whole kind of new dynamism in movies, but you can just feel the snottiness. I am sorry. And I like Godard. I like Contempt. I like Alphaville. And I know I am supposed to like Breathless, but I hate it!

ESQ: Your book contains a log of the movies you watched on any given day and I love that it starts out with Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, and The Phantom Menace. What a great trio of films.

PO:[laughs] Exactly. I was painfully nonjudgmental in what I went to see.

ESQ: I want to talk more about Star Wars because it's been such an influence on you and worked its way into so much of your material. But how did the exposure to so much classic filmmaking alter your perception or analysis of films that were new at the time?

PO: Well it really, really changed my perception of borrowing from other works. The more classic movies you go to see, the more you are like, "Oh that's where this came from and that's where that came from. I get it now." But what you realize is that even Star Wars is just a bunch of influences tied together. But they're all influences that inspired George Lucas to say, "Okay, I want to do an even better version of this." Or Tarantino... Because a lot of times movies inspire a bit of writing or a bit of comedy in me. But the difference between something like Star Wars or The Empire Strikes Back and The Phantom Menace is that The Phantom Menace is just a bunch of things that didn't inspire him. It's just like, "We'll do this scene and this scene." There is such a thing as uninspired borrowing, where the thing that you are referencing is not something that goaded you to better creativity. All it did was make you go, "Well it worked there, I'll just put it here." And you can tell the difference. It's a huge difference. That is always fascinating to me.

PO: Oh my God. I have watched all of that guy's stuff. And not just Star Wars, he goes through all the Star Trek movies and those are really instructive in terms of: Here are the horrible, cynical decisions being made and you can see right through them. There's also a great one he does about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which was amazing.

ESQ: Besides being funny, he actually does a full and really great analysis of these movies.

PO: Here's what's also genius about it: His analysis is amazing and he knows that if he was just sitting there doing an analysis of it, it would be unwatchable. So he goes, "Okay, I am going to do it as this character who can't say the word 'protagonist.'" He understands how a movie works and he doesn't know what the word "protagonist" means, which is a hilarious combination of things. Yeah, those are amazing. That is why I always put an asterisk now next to my criticism of the prequels. Those prequels? Yeah, they're awful. But they inspired a lot of amazing film scholarship that better films haven't done, which shows you the richness of the universe and how he is squandering it. That is what is so tragic.

ESQ: What is it that connected you so deeply to the original Star Wars?

PO: It's just pure bliss. It's just a guy who was thinking like a kid. You watch these science-fiction movies and they have like two or three really, really cool scenes and then the scenes that they feel like they have to put in there. And George Lucas was like, "What if it's just all cool scenes and we still tell a story?" Movies, when they really work, do appeal to the kid in you and that is the ultimate example of that. Pauline Kael used that phrase "Star Wars is like getting a box of Cracker Jack which is all prizes." That is a perfect way to describe it.

ESQ: What about the upcoming Star Wars movies? Are you excited about them? Indifferent? I assume you'll see them.

PO: I am just being cautiously optimistic. That is all I am being. I like J.J. [Abrams]. Look, I want any genre movie to be good. I'm not one of these guys who is rubbing my hands together going, "This Batman movie is going to suck." I want them all to be good! I want them all to work. Why would I want it to be terrible?

ESQ: What's you're feeling on movie remakes or reboots in general?

PO: I have nothing against reboots philosophically. Do it if you're really inspired and you see something that didn't work in the original and you think you have a better idea. But a lot of these, they are just kind of dead-eyed, cynical, "Oh it worked for us before so let's do another one." The first two Spider-Man movies were fucking great. So why do you need to reboot them? That's just like, "Well, we can squeeze some more money." But if you're making a reboot because someone had a great concept and didn't go far enough with it and you can go further, great. But I don't know. A lot of them are just cynical.

ESQ: Is there one role in classic cinema that you would love to play in a remake?

PO: Well, if it's a classic, I don't want it remade. I would never want to be in a remake of a movie that works perfectly. That just goes against everything that I like about it. I would want to write something totally original and create something that gets referenced by other people rather than, "Remember this role you liked? Well, we are going to do it again." And now I am going to do it!

ESQ: Take the remake aspect out of it. Is there one role that you watch time and time again that is a dream role for you?

PO: If I had been the one to do it for the very first time?

ESQ: Yes. One brilliant performance that stands out to you as a role you would've loved to play.

PO: There is a little Dustin Hoffman movie called Straight Time where he plays a convict who has been released and is trying to go straight. It's from the '70s and the studio just buried it. It was one of the best movies of the '70s—Dustin Hoffman, Theresa Russell, and Harry Dean Stanton. It's just an amazing performance in an amazing movie. But I would never want to remake it. I would love to be there in the '70s when they were making it for the first time. That would be incredible.

ESQ: How often do you go to the movies nowadays?

PO: Maybe once or twice a month. Maybe. Between my daughter and working on other stuff, and traveling. A lot of times, once you start working in movies, you don't get to see a lot of movies. You either get to see an early screening of something or you see it months after it comes out on DVD. That's the irony of the whole thing.

ESQ: Does the cinema experience feel different to you today than it did back then?

PO: I still love going to movies but I've been on the other side of it so much that it's hard for me to just dismiss a bad movie because I know that even on the worst movies, the people who worked on them busted their asses. It's rare to see a movie where you literally watch it and go, "These people were just not fucking trying. They didn't give a shit."

ESQ: What's the last great movie you saw?

PO: Boyhood. Boyhood is going to be one of those benchmark movies that things are going to be measured against—that is how good that was.

ESQ: What's your go-to guilty-pleasure movie?

PO: Guilty pleasure... oh man, I have so many of those. The thing is the term "guilty pleasure" for me: If I take pleasure in it, no fucking way am I going to feel guilty about that. You know, I love a lot of '80s action movies. I love The Long Kiss Goodnight. I know that Murder on the Orient Express is considered a classic movie, but Sidney Lumet fans consider it out of his wheelhouse. And it is just this delight for me. I like the mindless—especially mindless '80s—action track. As awful as that genre was all through the '80s, they really did capture something fun and awful that is still fun to watch.

ESQ: I think it may be physically impossible to turn off Road House.

PO: Oh fuck, it's fantastic.

ESQ: Someone recently told me that they didn't like No Country for Old Men and I immediately thought that person was an idiot. I am all for a difference of opinion, but is there any movie that almost pains you to hear someone talk about hating?

PO: The two for me are This Is Spinal Tap and Repo Man. Because it just shows that we are fundamentally on different spectrums in terms of what we think is comedy. And that is always what it's like. It doesn't really hurt me, it just means we are not going to be that close as people. And it's not a value judgment. We just think differently. I have watched Repo Man with friends from high school who say, "There are no jokes in this." It's nothing but jokes! They're just not handing them to you on a silver platter.

ESQ: The same person who told me Spinal Tap wasn't funny told me he couldn't make it through the first episode of Ricky Gervais's The Office. He didn't think that was funny either.

PO: Holy shit, are you serious? That's the thing where you want to go, "Look: Go live your life with the people that you get along with. You are just wasting all of our time right here. This is going to be unpleasant for both of us. So why do that to ourselves?"

ESQ: Your new book being released during movie awards season is, of course, appropriate. Are there any Oscar contenders that you are rooting for, in addition to Boyhood?

PO: Well definitely Boyhood. Definitely J.K. Simmons in Whiplash. I would really like to see him win. He's just been one of those steady presences forever in movies. I would love for the documentary Last Days in Vietnam to win because those are again a couple of documentary producers who have been slugging away for a long time. And that is just great that that happened. There's always a lot to root for at the Oscars. As frustrating as they can be—there was a huge lack of diversity this year on the one hand, but on the other hand they did go looking for some maybe smaller, more difficult films. So it's always a tradeoff.

ESQ: What about any egregious snubs?

PO:The Lego Movie. What the fuck? That is just inexcusable. That's going to be one of those movies where 10 years from now film snobs will be going, "I keep forgetting that wasn't even nominated." It's going to be one of those weird moments.

ESQ: You've taken over the New Beverly a few times as programmer. What have you screened?

PO: I showed a lot of Walter Matthau's stuff. He was one of my favorites—The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,The Laughing Policeman, Hopscotch, and stuff like that. And a lot of film noir from the '40s.

ESQ: I am going to go cliché on you now: You are trapped on a desert island with only one movie to watch for the rest of your life. What is it?

PO: Oh God, then I would kill myself. I would probably either take the original Bad News Bears or the documentary Hoop Dreams.

ESQ: You could not have chosen two more different films there.

PO: Well I am kind of into sports but with a lot of hidden character nooks and crannies in there that are fascinating and I don't know why movies don't do more of that today. So I just love that.

ESQ: Which reminds me that someone has my copy of Big Fan and I want it back.

PO: [laughs] Wow! I am glad you like it. Thank you!

ESQ: It's one of my favorite under-the-radar recommendations to people.

PO: It's so under-the-radar that it didn't even have a wide release. It was like the way a band goes on tour in a van and would just go from one theater to the next. It's like, "Do we have more than one print of this movie?" It was crazy.

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